Current Affairs

June 14, 2016

“Interesting. Very interesting!” screamed Barry Davies on Match of the Day back in the day. Who would have thought the same could apply to Adam Lallana running round in circles, or Martin Skrtel clearing his nasal passages?

On Wednesday evening Liverpool play Sevilla in the Europa League Final, Europe’s also-ran club tournament – and a chunk of UK football fans will be watching the game live on YouTube.

The match itself is unlikely to be memorable (although it’ll be enough for me to forgo watching the wash-up of Peggy Mitchell’s death). BT’s decision to make the game available as part of its “wider digital strategy”, throws up all manner of interesting thoughts and discussions about where sport, TV, digital platforms, broadband providers and hardware manufacturers are heading (other than the UEFA hospitality boxes in Basel).

There’s the digital platforms themselves. YouTube aren’t messing about, and their intentions are clear. CEO Susan Wojcicki got straight to the point with North American advertisers a fortnight ago, stating YouTube reaches “more 18-49 year olds during primetime than the top 10 TV shows combined.” Its claim for the mass audience – real people you meet in the pub, street or in the office – starts clouding things for the men running sports banking enormous cheques from TV companies.

Take the English Cricket Board for example. It picked up a BAFTA for its coverage of England’s last Ashes win, yet as Sean Ingle pointed out in The Guardian, more people watched a 1974 episode of Colombo on ITV3. In December, Joe Root failed to make the short list for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and team sponsor Waitrose called it a day.

If YouTube is ‘normal TV’, where does that leave the likes of the TV companies currently staying in the game by borrowing money from the City?

It’s here we can poke around the “wider digital strategy” hinted at by BT. Whatever channel or platform the sport is on – it’s got to get into our home or onto our tablet somehow – and that requires a network. The greater the demand for content via a network, the stronger and more reliable that network needs to be.

So if you’re a telcomms company with a best-in-market broadband and mobile network, pumping stuff into peoples’ homes whatever its source; that’s not a bad place to be.

It also puts you in a more robust position. What happens if Tim Cook wakes up tomorrow and says, ‘right, next, let’s do Apple Sport?’ Or Google’s Eric Schmidt says to YouTube’s Wojcicki, “would you like me to call Richard Scudamore?”

On the one hand, they don’t need to. They may wish to wait and allow the sports bodies to continue to approach them. US sports continue to make overtures with the NBA big advocates of YouTube, and the NFL agreeing a deal to screen games exclusively on Twitter. Sport isn’t rational though – and it has a habit of making men do stupid things with their money, through the blind love of it all. Why else would we get up at 4am to go to Sunderland?

People in grey-glassed offices will start to shift uncomfortably – but for fans, that’s a day to be welcomed. More eyes on more sports at more accessible prices and on more accessible platforms? What’s not to love about that?

January 13, 2014

His owner Richard tweeted his picture, and Bob’s your uncle, Benny’s “the world’s most famous dog.” (Mail Online). Mail Online, is the world’s biggest English language newspaper site. Benny’s been shared 697 times. A story alongside on it, on the reform of the British welfare system is shared 243 times.

Without stating the bleeding obvious, or building on what Siobhan Sharpe might say; there is, what is often referred to in a patronising manner, "a lesson here."

Agency planners are paid, and build their careers on their intelligence. It is in their personal interest to build their personal brands with the trappings of that evidence. Data, intelligent publications, tweeting Economist and Harvard Business Review links to clients all do their bit to build credibility and sell an idea. Creatives too, lean heavily on culture for commercial gain. Work emanating from art, design and theatrical studios in cities across the world, end up in diluted form for commercial gain within 12 months.

None of that is to be sniffed at – just as long as the intelligenzia that help to shift consume products recognise the power that comes from the lowest common denominator. It’s a world where the written word is simply not needed. The copywriter becomes surplus to requirements.

An image that makes you laugh, fantasise or cringe, is your passport to worldwide fame and access to eyeballs. Benny is living proof and by dint of statistic, cannot be ignored.

The ingredients of imagery - useful for any creative session - include:

October 09, 2013

There are three stories from the past couple of weeks that are worthy of pulling together.

Cyrus / O’Connor

It’s been seven hours and fifteen days (approximately) since
Miley Cyrus and Sinead O’Connor exchanged open letters on the subject of mental
disintegration. Within a couple of weeks, Cyrus has transformed herself into a
breathing version of Razzle, and reached the global Premier League of
celebrity. Hard work? Music? Forget it. The 'tits out and trend' strategy pays an
instant dividend, even if she’ll end up in rehab on Sinead O’Connor’s old ward
in a year or two.

Jacklin

Tony Jacklin – a man who would feature prominently in a
review of the 20th Century of European golf – wore purple glitter
and was humiliated in front of nine million people watching Strictly Come
Dancing. Richard Gillis, who in his own words "likes to take a (pause) (arch eyebrow) ‘sidewayslook’ at the
sports industry”; picked up on a Tony Jacklin Q&A in Golf International
magazine. “I’m told that these days you need to keep on reinventing yourself,
to let people know you’re still alive and kicking.”

Questions. What has happened to the concept of dignity in
the entertainment business? Is it possible for people who crave attention to
still do so, and retain a sense of self-worth?

If your output is shit, perhaps it’s a struggle. A listen to
the incidental part of Cyrus’s career – her music – would explain why she’s got
them out.

Jacklin however, has stories no-one should tire of listening to or learning
from (ref: Birkdale, Lytham, the Belfry, Seve). These carry value. The last
thing that man, or any of us need, is reinvention. My advice Tony – take a look
at the example being set to you by Peter. Less is (commercially) more.

August 09, 2013

Ten days ago two rich
advertising men - closeted by a small, sharkish cabal of investment bankers
sniffing a wedge - cut a deal. Ten days later, a fatberg of online bilge has
spewed from hundreds of thousands of online sources in over sixty countries.
Sift your way through all the opinion, comment and knowledge and two dominant
terms emerge: “I” and “my.” No-one knew. But did that stop the advertising and
comms industry telling you it knew? (Rhetorical).

Advertising and comms is an
insecure and paranoid business. There is an endless race to be the ear that the
CEO whispers an insight into, in the hunt for competitive and financial
advantage. PR fares little better – in fact, the industry is fairly overt about
it – whinging about its inferiority – rather than acting on it.

Perception and reality are
two different beasts – as one would expect from an industry whose business is
perception. On day two or three of Publicom, what began to grate was reading a
stream of links from people roughly one hundred steps removed from the
Wren/Levy meetings; giving their own seals of approvals on smartphones,
thousands of miles away.

“The more I see of this Publicis-Omnicom deal the
more I like.”

“Here’s the downside to the Publicis-Omnicom merger.”

“Publicis-Omnicom isn’t a surprise for five reasons.”

“Wren’s been smart here..”

Wren and Levy’s surnames
were dropped into posts with the ease and intimacy of football managers doing a
deal over a £10million “Macedonian misfit,” or a “wantaway striker.”

July 22, 2013

What do you get if a cross a
Tory cabinet minister with a French new wave cinema starlet? Ordinarily a court
order – but in this instance, something thought provoking.

First, Jeremy Hunt – a man
not shy of a camera and a headline – has gone and done a Diana. The Health
Secretary has got himself a surgical gown, a pair of latex gloves and a freelance
photographer; and distributed images of himself working as a shift nurse in an
A&E unit. (Presumably not one of the 14
underperforming hospitals earmarked in last week’s review).

Hunt’s angle though is
admirable. How is he supposed to tackle thousands of complaints he receives over
citizens’ treatment in the hands of the NHS without working on the front line
himself? Cristina
Odone in the Telegraph makes the point crisply: “The only way to learn is
to do.” Correct (to a point).

Yes, we can learn by
experience. Another way to learn is to convert information into knowledge.

Astrid Berges-Frisbey
(pictured for reference) is the 27 year old French-Spanish actress and star of
Juliette. Juliette – according to The
Guardian – is the latest in a new wave of European films that depicts the
stories of life for young people living against a backdrop of austerity and
Eurozone meltdown.

The “grey-eyed and
chain-smoking” actress (presumably not Lambert & Butler) looked out of the
window wistfully and said, “We have more tools, more choices, and yet we live as if
constantly paralysed.” Spot on love, (I’d say if I were her agent or northern).

In
short, what she is hinting at is an argument being put forward by many others –
including Baroness
Greenfield. Her view is that our brains are beginning to function
differently. Our click-click, always
online, never satisfied information gathering is relentless, without allowing
it to pause, permeate and be converted into knowledge (in the way that
traditional education via reading and study, does). We sit smoking fags looking
out of windows flicking an iPhone pouring thousands of images into our brain,
but less and less of it is sinking in.

In short, what Hunt, Berges-Frisbey and
Greenfield are showing us is that we’d do well to recognise the difference
between information and intelligence. Getting a grip of Twitter and your RSS
feeds is all well and good – but what you do with it is what counts.

January 12, 2012

That said, shareholders aren’t going to take too kindly to days when the share price drops 16%.

The headlines say the supermarket's Christmas campaign failed to entice shoppers into store. This won't be a marketing issue, but an operational one. This is a company that is massive, bloated and listless. Its non-food businesses have done bonkers numbers in the last few years, and now occupy enormous acres of floor space. The shrinking core food business retracts apologetically, literally in front of the eyes of customers.

Politicians and Twitter are going to end up eating each other. Watch Question Time or listen to Any Questions, and it's not enough to listen to the views of 5 guests and an audience of 100 people. You have to have a Dimbleby stumbling over the term 'hashtag' before they start.

In its purest form, politics is about shaping a debate and influencing people within a larger narrative called society. Ideas and arguments need oxygen. They need room to breathe. They generally need more than 140 characters. Speeches, articles, print, blogs, podcasts. They're all there. And we do have time to think about these things.

Just use 130 characters and a bit.ly next time Diane. Save yourself a world of shit.

October 15, 2011

Ever so slightly nauseated this week by The Guardian's decision to publish its newslist. "You can help us make the news." "Have your say." All that bullshit. It's the sort of move that grants some swooning at a Haymarket conference with words like "progressive," "open" and "bold experiment," bandied around.

I love The Guardian and its variety of digital and paper products. I'm 38 years old, work in something media related and crucially, know who Korn are. On that basis, it's the only paper I'm allowed to buy. The only downside to The Guardian unfortunately is that for all its cleverness - the bastard hemorrhages money.

If you want to make money one day (retain readership, properly monetise that large global audience etc) don't cheapen the product. Handing the editorship of the paper over to bored people in train carriages with smartphones seems counter to what you ought to be paying for. I'd like to hand my money over to an editor, who selects some great writing and presents it to me in a nice typeface on a couple of screens and on paper. I'm not giving it to the bloke sat next to me.